The phone rings. It’s an unknown number. But for once it’s not sales, spam or a random; it’s a quiet, calm voice that draws you, image by image, into shifting lines of a half-glimpsed story. This is your handler, and they are here to take you, phrase by step by surprise, into a story inside a story, an adventure inside a scene inside an encounter. This is Transience: you are audience and player in this interactive story tailored to your narrative needs

Maybe there’s a game? Maybe it’s reality? A gentle introduction, richly described, eases you into comfortable narrative space that drifts calmly between story and guided imagination. But this is no time for a meditation! There are clues to be found, characters to encounter, weird scenes in unfamiliar places to explore. Along the way there are puzzles, encounters, wrong turns and characters that loom, suddenly unsettlingly real, out of the background of the softly described world.

Game-like transitions and puzzling artefacts join hands with escape-room puzzles and codes. The urge to close your eyes and focus on the voice drifts you into a liminal, dream-like story-state. Questions bring you back to narrative choices; will you try to solve the problem, solve the code, check your bags, or will you take a more intuitive path? This shifting world of inexplicable goals, puzzling revelations, sudden twists and complicated half-choices feels oddly familiar-yet-alien.

Each path through the story is unique to the play and the player. The constant sense of the choice not explored haunts the narrative with a nostalgia and deju vu. I always have paper ready anyway, but you might want some, to take the odd note; and make sure you have a beverage to hand so you won’t sound too gruff as you negotiate your choices. For everything else, you’ll have to ask your handler.

Transience is available from the Oxford Playhouse and delivered as a Whatsapp voice call.